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We are radical lesbian feminists in the UK who are friends and activists in real life.

In the past, lesbians were often at the forefront of political organising, including feminist activism. Now, though radical lesbian feminists still work extremely hard at the forefront, our perspectives are silenced in political spaces. This blog is to counteract our invisibility within the feminist movement, within mixed ‘radical’ left movements, and most urgently, under the Queer LGBT movement.

We recognise that gender is a tool created by Patriarchy to control and subjugate women. We seek to abolish it. We are Queer and Trans critical because these theories seek to reinforce gender, further enshrine it in law. They exist in opposition to gender abolition.

This blog will take a consciousness raising approach, analysing our own life experiences and those of women around us through a feminist lens. When we begin to understand the context of…

Two national GLBT organizations want the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to re-evaluate a policy that limits cancer screenings to Women. In a letter to the CDC sent by the Human Rights Campaign and the National Center for Transgender Equality, the groups believe that a CDC policy that denies subsidized cancer screening to low-income transgender women under the Breast and Cervical Cancer Mortality Prevention Act of 1990 because they are not Women is “clearly discriminatory, dangerous to the health of an at-risk population, inconsistent with prevailing recommendations for transgender health care and at odds with current federal policy ensuring access to care for transgender individuals.” The letter comes amid reports that a transgender woman in Colorado is suing after a state-run health care program turned her away for free breast-cancer screenings because she is “not genetically female.”

In the last 20 years, we’ve seen a rapid expansion in rights extended to discrete groups. Marriage equality was unthinkable in 1993, and now the U.S. Supreme Court has paved the way for gay marriage. We applaud these advances, but, unfortunately, some bad has come with the good. Most notably, the expansion of rights for transgender people has intruded upon the rights of Women. GLBT organizations advance laws to ban discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations against transgender people, who identify with the sex opposite their birth sex. We admire this goal in most contexts; however, gender identity legislation codifies into law sex stereotypes that Women have struggled to shake for decades. Gender identity legislation also raises specific issues in the context of sex-segregated spaces such as locker rooms and domestic violence shelters because it allows anyone to gain entrance into a space reserved for the opposite sex by…

On Friday 7 June 2013, a group of radical feminist activists went into the heart of London to reclaim our right to meet as females. On the eve of the first openly held women’s liberation conference in decades, women gathered in the busiest railway station in the UK.

We were there to celebrate our triumph at meeting together in a large women-only space – despite all the obstacles thrown in our way before we could get there. They included: wrongly asserting that females meeting together, without men, is unlawful; falsely stating in the social media that our politics is violent and hateful; accusing our speakers of “hate speech” and calling for them to be “no platformed” simply for critiquing gender; naming truths about male violence; intimidating venues into cancelling our conference and anonymously threatening our organisers and attendees with violence and rape.

Today, there seems to be a virtually unquestioning embrace of the concept of “leadership” within (radical) feminist circles.

This blog post will set out why I critique the concept of “leadership” as a method of organisation which is fundamentally incompatible with feminism. I will criticise not just the use of the word by (radical) feminists, but also the patriarchal practice behind it, even if the rhetoric of “sisterhood” is used to promote it.

THE PAST AND NON-HIERARCHICAL POLITICAL ACTION

I admit to having many a rose-coloured trip down memory lane as I remember workshops without facilitators at feminist conferences, direct actions without a clear plan before we get there, and when the police came to talk to us, their being told there was no spokesMAN and their confusion as they scrabbled about not knowing how to relate to a phenomenon outside their rigid world order.

Today, there seems to be a virtually unquestioning embrace of the concept of “leadership” within (radical) feminist circles.

This blog post will set out why I critique the concept of “leadership” as a method of organisation which is fundamentally incompatible with feminism. I will criticise not just the use of the word by (radical) feminists, but also the patriarchal practice behind it, even if the rhetoric of “sisterhood” is used to promote it.

THE PAST AND NON-HIERARCHICAL POLITICAL ACTION

I admit to having many a rose-coloured trip down memory lane as I remember workshops without facilitators at feminist conferences, direct actions without a clear plan before we get there, and when the police came to talk to us, their being told there was no spokesMAN and their confusion as they scrabbled about not knowing how to relate to a phenomenon outside their rigid world order.